The Triple Threat to Good Decisions: Data, Time and Emotion
Filed under: "To Do" List, Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Professional Growth, Strategy
There are few situations more challenging to teams than dealing with a tough, emotionally-charged issue and decision-choice while facing significant time pressure and seemingly contradictory data.
If that type of situation sounds uncommon or unrealistic, consider that many firms and management teams make critical priority calls and strategic choices under just such circumstances. The decision to launch Challenger was a prime example, with all three factors playing a huge role in this tragic call. Countless corporate strategic misfires owe their outcome to this triple-threat of data, time and emotion.
While many situations don’t involve life-safety issues, this triple-threat is something that every manager should be critically sensitive to in their group and strategic decision-making.
Data, Bloody Data
Let’s start here first. We would like to believe that we are making data-driven, fact-based calls on key issues. Unfortunately, the data quality facts don’t back that opinion.
Our firms have invested small fortunes in powerful data warehousing, enterprise management and analytics software programs, yet report after report substantiates that the data in our systems is crap. It’s poor quality, obsolete and just plain wrong. (Visit The Data Warehouse Institute for more on this topic.)
Beyond the fatal data quality issues, we struggle with too much information and the very real and challenging issue of how to interpret the data. Given this challenge, it’s common for individuals and groups to engage in a game of data-roulette, including:
- Looking for the data that confirms our opinion and then seizing upon this confirmation evidence at the expense of potentially contradictory error.
- Sampling on the dependent variable instead of the independent variable. This common logic error has people looking at the wrong issue and improperly attributing cause and effect.
- Ignoring the data. Given the volume of data typically just a click away, it’s easy for individuals and groups to quickly become confused or overwhelmed or both. Another outcome of too much data is analysis paralysis.
Time after Time
Most timelines for business initiatives are contrived, yet many managers and groups allow artificial deadlines to impact the quality of their decisions. Certainly, we all know that time is money and that windows of opportunity can close, and yet, I wouldn’t let either of those clichés drive me to make a poor quality decision. I’ll accept that speed of decision-making is important, but only if it is counter-balanced with quality.
Watch Out When Emotions Rule the Day
My favorite, nausea inducing line of all is, “You’ve got to take off your (insert your functional hat) and put on your business hat.” That invitation to suspend logic, slice your IQ and commonsense in half and make a poor call is often a ploy to both manipulate and to quickly resolve an emotion-laden issue by imploring someone to suspend judgment.
We don’t’ make good decisions under emotional stress, and that goes for relationships and major life events as well as business situations. Our well documented and well-established fear of change, its’ close cousin, our propensity to pursue something that looks like the status quo, and our over-reliance on gut calls to reduce or avoid conflict and resolve time-pressures and data ambiguity issues all contribute to crappy decision-making.
7 Suggestions to Keep the Triple Headed Monster of Poor Decision-Making Locked Up
I pull no punches on this topic. As the leader, you are on the hook for teaching your team to make good decisions. Your firm depends upon it and your career depends upon it.
1. Strive for Crystal Clarity on the Issue! Frame the issue and carefully conduct a process- check to ensure that you are all looking at the same core issue and decision.
2. Hit the Brakes! If time-pressure takes over, it’s your job to hit the brakes! I’m not certain of attribution, but the phrase: “slow down and think carefully before you do something stupid” jumps to mind here.
3. Hit the Brakes, Part 2: Too many managers are fearful of raising their hands and saying, “hold it.” As a leader, foster a culture where people don’t get knee-capped for pulling the chain to stop the production line, and as a professional, develop a spine.
4. Just the Facts! Spend time assessing what you know, and very importantly, defining what you still need to know to make a decision. This last part….”what we need to know,” is often skipped.
5. Turn Data Into Information and Knowledge. Monitor data integrity and quality, and work with your group to carefully wrap it in meaning. This step is the source of many of the errors described above, so note your assumptions, watch out for framing and confirming evidence errors. Consider involving objective 3rd parties to help look at and interpret the data and data needs.
6. Recall Drucker’s Saying: “Every Decision is a Risk-Taking Judgment.” Teach your team to think through and prioritize on risks. Use face-to-face and anonymous input to ensure that risks are identified without the bias of social interaction.
7. Vent the Emotions and Then Move On: De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats does this brilliantly. Use his process, or, at least create an opportunity for everyone to vent and then challenge them to focus on facts, risks, opportunities and ideas. (Frankly, Six Thinking Hats process is a tool that has the potential to improve discussion and decision quality. Consider identifying an experienced facilitator to help you with this process.)
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Time pressures, emotional factors and data issues are at the root of many poor life and business decisions. High performance teams and effective leaders recognize these factors, talk openly about them when they start to encroach, and work hard at locking them back in their cage when quality of judgment is in danger. It’s time to slay this triple-threat to effective decision-making in your environment.
6 Steps for Avoiding Groupthink on Your Team
Filed under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Project Management, Strategy
Groupthink is one of the nefarious decision-making missteps of teams, and a trap that many smart people and groups have fallen victim to throughout history.
From the classic example cited in nearly every discussion on decision-making, the Kennedy administration’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, to Ford’s launch of the Edsel, to Neviille Chamberlin’s inner circle that believed peace with Hitler was at hand, Groupthink has earned a prominent place in our culture.
And while you might not be planning an invasion or negotiation with evil dictators or planning on launching an ugly automobile, chances are that Groupthink has shown up from time to time in your professional world.
Groupthink at Work in the Workplace:
The essence of this decision-making trap is the irrational pursuit of consensus above all other priorities. Along the way, those that study group dynamics have identified a number of technical characteristics of Groupthink, including:suppression of reality testing, censorship of doubts, ignoring outside information, overconfidence and an emerging attitude of invulnerability. While some of these terms have a distinct technical ring to them, they are descriptive enough to suggest a closed, insular and out-of-touch with reality team culture.
I see Groupthink at work regularly on management teams that have convinced themselves that their strategy is the only way forward. They spend months defining a universe that fits their collective frame of reference, and then they build plans to operate in that universe. While the plans are often elegant, the team’s construct on the external world and clients becomes as much fiction as fact, guaranteeing failure. After a long period of time invested in framing this strategy, Groupthink’s cousin, Escalation of Commitment, joins the party and together, they work to block out evidence to the contrary and prevent the team from recognizing the need to restart.
Functional groups are prone to a kind of Groupthink, when the organization’s culture and structure emphasizes rigid boundaries and strong penalties for stepping on turf and toes that are not your own. The isolated group begins to define the internal and external world from its own viewpoint, and almost as a survival strategy, it shuts out external opinion and blocks ideas that are potentially threatening to their view and their silo boundaries.
And perhaps more commonplace, project groups of all types work to believe that achieving consensus is the only way to move forward on an issue. Often, if you peel a layer back on the push towards consensus, it’s driven in large part out of an irrational concern for the feelings of others. “We want people to feel invested,” or, “I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.” If this were the holiday season, I would offer a distinct, “Humbug!” The pursuit of consensus gives rise to the tyranny of mediocrity. Or worse.
6 Steps to Avoid Groupthink on Teams:
1. Anticipate Groupthink in your Risk Plan. While it might sound like planning to fail, ignoring the potential for Groupthink is a failure to plan for a very real risk. And like any risk plan, there must be processes for monitoring and mitigating emerging Groupthink.
2. Size counts. Limit the typical team size to less than 10 and ensure that there are well-defined boundaries for inclusion. Porous team boundaries and widespread casual involvement on teams breeds dysfunction, including pressure towards consensus for the wrong reasons.
3. Invite external perspectives at various stages of the process. Of course, you’ve got to have the procedures in place to both protect external viewpoints and to find ways to incorporate them into the group’s thinking and plans.
4. Lengthen the discussion phase…use structured discussion to focus on vetting the issues. Delay a rush to judgment. I encourage groups to incorporate non-typical discussion processes such as Six Hats Thinking to dramatically improve discussion quality.
5. Develop a second solution. I referenced this approach in Practical Lessons in Leadership. Challenge your team to assume that management will reject their first solution. Develop an alternative and very different second solution and be prepared to defend it.
6. Invite the Devil’s Advocate to the party. While a designated Devil’s Advocate is a contrived role and everyone knows it, at least someone will be throwing rocks at the groups beautiful picture. Rules on respecting and vetting the DA’s perspective are critical to benefitting from this approach.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Forewarned is forearmed. Decision-making is tough enough, and it grows in complexity when there are groups involved. Don’t naively assume that your group of smart people is immune to the many pitfalls and missteps that dot the path towards a decision. Groupthink is like the common cold, and while there may not be a cure, there sure are some preventative measures that can help keep it at bay.
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